本单元我们将更多地探讨提升学习能力的重要理念与技巧。你还将了解怎样与其他学员更有效地互动、怎样认识到自己的优势、怎样避免“冒充者综合征”。战斗机飞行员与外科医生利用清单来帮助自己理清重要的任务,你也可使用类似的清单帮助自己备战测验。最后你还将更多地了解在学习中充实自我的乐趣。
怎样成为更好的学习者
Welcome back to Learning How to Learn. Today we're going to talk about how to become a better learner. As we learn more about the brain we can become better learners, and here are two tips for how to learn better.
Tip number one, the best gift that you can give your brain is Physical Exercise. We once thought that all of the neurons in your brain were already present at birth, but we now know that in a few places, new neurons are born every day. One of these places is in your Hippocampus, a brain area that is very important for learning new things that we already discussed earlier in the course.
In this experiment, a rat is shown, learning how to distinguish a picture of a flower from a picture of an airplane. In the background is a photo of neurons in the hippocampus, with the old neurons shown in blue and newly generated neurons in red. As the rat learns the task, these new neurons are recruited to help perform better pattern separation between the two pictures. These new neurons help you learn new things but they will die if you don't use them. New experiences will rescue them.
Exercise, interestingly, also helps new neurons survive. Exercise is by far, more effective than any drug on the market today to help you learn better. It benefits all of your vital organisms, not just your brain. It is unfortunate that schools are dropping gym and recess to make room for more instruction. Gym and recess are by far the most important parts of the curriculum.
Here's another tip and this has to do with practice making perfect, but only when your brain is prepared. There are certain critical periods in the development of your brain. When sudden improvements occur in specific abilities, expect them to happen and prepare your brain for them. The critical period for first language acquisition extends up to puberty. One of the best studied critical periods in the brain is when binocular depth perception or stereopsis matures during the first two years of life. Stereopsis is the magic behind Magic Eye pictures like the one shown here. If you stare at this image and slightly cross your eyes, you will see staircases pop out of the page. There is a slight shift between the images in the two eyes and your brain interprets this slight shift as difference in depth. Not everyone, however, can see this. Over 5% of the population is stereo blind. If the two eyes are not properly aligned during the first two years of development, the neurons in your visual cortex will fail to properly strengthen the inputs from the two eyes and depth perception is permanently impaired. Well, that's the dogma. But Sue Barry, a friend of mine from graduate school at Princeton, was able to recover stereo vision through eye exercises. And wrote a book about it, entitled Fixing My Gaze, a scientist's journey into seeing in three dimensions. Practice can repair, as well as train the brain. But this takes much longer, past the critical period. This brings us to zombies. Zombies can't learn. It is also clear from their behavior that they have brain damage. Especially in the front of their cortex, which is the part that makes plans, as well as in their language areas. Learning, Planning, Language, these are the skills that make us human.
The prefrontal cortex is also involved in complex analysis in social behaviors, as well as decision making and planning. It is the last part of the cortex to mature, so until this happens, there may be a little bit of zombie in you. Another patient, EVR, suffered a stroke in the social parts of his prefrontal cortex. EVR had a high IQ and seemed normal, but he was ruined by making bad financial decisions and bad social interactions. He lost both his home and his family. Good judgement takes a long time, and a lot of experience to acquire.
Learning, is too important to be left behind in the classroom. Learning to learn is a skill you can master. And you can use it to improve every part of your life. You'll be learning even more learning tips this week, and can follow up on them at brainfacts.org. I'm Terry Sejnowski, happy learning to you until we meet again.
欢迎回到“如何学习”这门课,今天我们来谈谈怎样成为更优秀的学习者。多了解大脑,有助于学习。
对于这点,我们有两个小窍门。
第一点 奖励大脑最好的方式就是做运动
老观点认为出生后脑中神经元总数就不变了,但现在发现某些特定区域每天都会有新的神经元产生,海马体就是这些特定区域之一 。我们前面讲过,它对学习新事物至关重要。在这个实验中,一只老鼠在学习如何区分花和飞机的图片。背景图就是海马体中的神经元,图中蓝色部分是旧神经元,红色的是新产生的神经元。为了更好地区分两张图片,老鼠在学习时会调用新生神经元,这些新的神经元能帮助我们学习新事物。但是如果我们不用,它们就会死亡。新的学习经历能帮助它们存活下来。有趣的是,做运动也可以帮助新神经元存活。想学习更上一层楼,运动锻炼比市面上任何的药都更有用,它有益于所有的重要器官,而不仅仅是大脑。不幸的是,现在的学校纷纷牺牲体育课和课间休息
给上课腾位置,而体育课和课间休息才是课程表里最重要的部分。
第二点和熟能生巧有关,但这只有在大脑准备好的情况下才有效。
大脑发展有几个黄金时期,那时某些特定能力会突然提高,你要意识到这一点并让大脑做好准备。
学习母语的黄金时期一直延续到青春期。目前研究得最多的是0-2岁,此时是双眼深度知觉,即立体视觉成熟的黄金时期。立体视觉就是这张魔幻三维图片所体现的神奇原理。如果你盯着这幅图看,稍微把眼睛眯成对眼,就会发现台阶从画面上凸出来。因为我们左右眼看到的图片有细微差别,大脑就将这种差别当作深度上的不同。但并非所有人都能看到这个,超过5%的人没有立体视觉能力。如果双眼在头两年发展期没有校准对齐,视皮层的神经元就无法正确加工双眼输入的信息,深度知觉能力也将会受到永久损害,这就是颠扑不破的真理。
但是我的朋友,来自普林斯顿研究生院的Sue Barry她通过眼部锻炼重新恢复了立体视觉,她还为此写了一本书,书名是《正目视之:一位科学家的3D世界之旅》。锻炼既能修复大脑也能训练大脑,但错过了黄金时期则需要更长时间才能恢复。
这让我们想到僵尸,僵尸不能学习,从他们的行为中也可以看出,他们有脑部损伤,尤其是在负责制定计划的脑前额叶部分,受损伤的还有负责语言的区域。人之为人是因为我们有学习、计划和说话的能力。社会行为、下决策、制定计划时做的繁复分析,都涉及调用前额叶皮层,这是大脑皮层中最后成熟的部分,所以在它成熟之前,我们身体里可能都有一小部分“僵尸” 。另一个病人 EVR 他前额叶中的社交部分受损,EVR智商很高,看起来也很正常,失败的投资和糟糕的社会行为毁掉了他的生活。他失去了房子和家人。
人们需要很长的时间和大量的经验才能做出明智的判断。学习太重要了,我们不能仅局限于坐在教室里学。学着怎样去学习是一种你能掌握的技巧,而且你能用它来提升自己生活的各个方面,这周你们会学到更多的学习技巧。你们可以在brainfacts.org上查询。我是Terry Sejnowski 祝你们学习愉快,我们下次再见。
复兴式学习与释放你的潜力概论
This week we're going to wrap up a slew of important ideas and techniques that will help round out and enhance your ability to learn well using metaphors and analogies to work profitably with teammates and not to undercut your own strengths, and finally, to perform well on tests. One important thought though before we launch into this week's videos. Learning doesn't progress logically so that each day just adds an additional neat package to your knowledge shelf. Sometimes you hit a wall in constructing your understanding. Things that made sense before can suddenly seem confusing. This type of knowledge collapse seems to occur when your mind is restructuring it's understanding, building a more solid foundation. In the case of language learners, they experience occasional periods when the foreign language suddenly seems completely incomprehensible. Remember, it takes time to assimilate new knowledge. You'll inevitably go through some periods where you seem to take an exasperating step backwards in your understanding. This is a natural phenomenon that means that your mind is wrestling deeply with the material. You'll find that when you emerge from these periods of temporary frustration, your knowledge base will take a surprising leap forward. I'm Barbara Oakley. Thanks for learning How to Learn.
这周我们将总结一系列重要的想法和技巧,这些将有助于完善和提高你使用隐喻和类比进行有效学习的能力,与团队成员合作,而不是削弱自己的优势,并最终在考试中表现良好。在我们开始本周的视频之前,有一个重要的想法。学习并不是逻辑上的进步,因此每一天只是在你的知识架上添加一个额外的整洁的包裹。有时你在构建理解时会遇到困难。以前有意义的事情突然变得令人困惑。这种知识崩溃似乎发生在你的大脑正在重新构建理解,建立更坚实的基础的时候。对于语言学习者来说,他们偶尔会经历一段时间,外语突然变得完全无法理解。记住,吸收新知识需要时间。你不可避免地会经历一些时期,你似乎在你的理解上走了令人恼火的一步后退。这是一个自然现象,意味着你的大脑正在深入地处理材料。你会发现,当你从这些暂时的挫折中走出来时,你的知识基础将会出人意料地向前飞跃。感谢学习如何学习。